Noel Coward, The Actors' Orphanage and The Italian Job

Embed from Getty Images

Who directed The Italian Job?

I couldn't have told you until the other day, when I came across a page about the films of Peter Collinson. It has an unnerving habit of telling you what the people it mentions expired from, and Collinson himself was only 44 when he died in 1980.

Starting in television, Collinson went on to make his name as a director with two 1968 releases: Up the Junction and The Long Day's Dying. The latter, which is the most substantial David Hemmings film I've yet to see, won him the job on The Italian Job.

That seems to have been the highpoint of his career, as his later films tended to be filmed in exotic locations and star Oliver Reed, but there may be some forgotten gems among them. 

Besides, by the early Seventies there were hardly any British films being made that weren't sex comedies or adaptations of television sitcoms, so Collinson did well to maintain a directing career at all.

Collinson's life story explains the surprising but welcome presence of Noel Coward in The Italian Job.

 As that page says:

Collinson was the son of an actress and a musician who more or less abandoned him to live with his grandparents before being raised at the Actor’s Orphanage from ages eight to 14. 

Noel Coward was president of the orphanage at the time and became Collinson’s godfather, guiding him through his failure to enter the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts but into other theatre jobs, then tv and film.

It was Collinson who got Coward the role: the original plan had been to cast Nicol Williamson.

The picture above, which was taken in 1939, shows Coward entertaining some of the children at the Chertsey orphanage. There's lots about its history on the Actors' Children's Trust site.

Coward's presidency and guidance of Collinson was the subject of a radio play' Mr Bridger's Orphan, which you will find below.

I don't know how true its story of Coward as a reformer is, but the childcare charities were a force in the land early in the 20th century and did tend to favour large, barrack-like homes for their young charges.

Equally, the play's version of Coward's fellow trustee Sir Cedric Hardwicke may be a libel, but it's not unusual to find people using the privations of their own private education to make light of the mistreatment of children in care.